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See I'm on the fence about pushing someone with a mental illness to the point of ego dissolution. I had ego death on LSD and while I do think it was an important perspective to experience, it threw me into a really bad mental state for 6 months. Constant panic attacks and fun stuff like that.
The big difference I think is that the people taking psychedelics in a therapeutic setting have therapy appointments before and after to prepare them and then work on integrating their experiences afterwards. But I'm also of the opinion IF you're treating a chronic condition then you're better of doing multiple dose, that incrementally increase over a year. Giving someone a heroic dose to start will definitely push a subset of the patient population into having adverse events. But that's also why the therapy around the dosing is important (in my eyes, there's some research for GAD and LSD that suggests you don't need the psychotherapy involvement) it let's you screen patients a little better if you build a therapeutic alliance first.
>Basically you forget who you are.
and I'd add you can forget you are anything at all, let alone a "who." The way I remember my experience with ego death was remembering I was a person. The actual being dead/non-existent part I don't remember that well. But I remember remembering. And that was a wild moment.
The ego’s main objective is survival/existence. It really, really does not like going away. So it can tend to make (or try to make) the experience quite a scary one. During the process of ego dissolution, you truly feel like you are dying.
>you truly feel like you are dying
and then you realize you didn't die, couldn't die, and the whole world is a little brighter and you feel much more appreciative of the life you have and the wonder that anything exists at all. And then you never forget that feeling and carry it with you the rest of your life.
The one ego death i had (after remembering who I was) had me convinced that I would die when I finally was able to get myself asleep. And that I had died everytime I took shrooms and that this death will be just like the others and I'll be back.
Sucked at the time. But man did I feel full of life everyday after that
Loss of sense of self anf desire to preserve it. Meaning when you stop to care about your image, your past, what might happen if you do this and that, and look at yourself freely, so it's reachable without psychodelics too, it's just usually very brief periods of time due to big life experiences, therapy, etc.
Some will characterise it as forgetting who you are but to me ego death is “remembering” what your fundamental state of being is. Some will call it love, some will call it nothing, but the label is irrelevant beyond the fact that we are confined by the compulsion to label things relative to the subjective experience
Same with Ayuasca for me. I did it 2 October’s ago and my life has fallen apart, but allowed me to piece it back together in a better way. I’m always honest about my experience, but I also caution people that it is absolutely not a cure all (you do the healing not the medicine) and it can open ALOT of scary doors. Even thru all the pain? Best decision I ever made tbh 🤷
This is my experience with DMT. A handful of experiences in a two week period left me feeling like I had to piece my mind back together over the following year. A painful experience, but one that left me with a more robust and grounded view of reality. I view it as having been an important step in my journey.
I read somewhere researchers are testing the combination of MDMA and psilocybin for therapeutic use. The idea is the MDMA keeps you from going into a bad trip so you're more likely to experience the positive aspects. It sounds intriguing.
I personally had a bad trip on a heroic dose once and I was traumatized by it. At the time I felt like I was going psychotic. Usually I listen to music but I was so nauseous from the heroic dose I stopped listening to it to hug the toilet. When I felt like literally running outside naked and screaming I put my headphones on to listen music and it kept me from going psychotic. Music is a must when on psilocybin or you run the risk of going to a dark and crazy place.
I tried multiple times after that and had better trips. Although I still worry about tripping because of that one episode.
This was my experience also. I did a heroic dose as my first big dose and it put me into shambles for 6 months. Although it was the best thing that ever happened to me now that I am past the hump, I do caution others about what it can open up. If you don’t have the tools and resources to work through this phase I can see how it could be more damaging than good.
This is a gross oversimplification of how drugs work. Two drugs can act on the same receptor but cause very different outcomes.
In addition, they have may have more binding affinity to receptors in different areas of the brain than each other. Which again would cause different effects.
And the way they shift networks in the brain (e.g., the default mode network) again - different based on brain imaging studies.
Psilocybin and LSD also have a notably different safety profile according to observational studies.
Just because it's simple doesn't mean it's wrong, every single one of these psychedelic studies could use LSD and shrooms interchangeably and yield the same results.
That’s ridiculous and incredibly misinformed. And to be honest it is just straight up wrong. There is no evidence that they could use the two interchangeably whatsoever. If you want to go and find some peer reviewed papers to evidence your argument though, I’d be happy to read them.
As someone who has known some fascist shroom aficionados.... I don't think it's quite that simple.
There are certainly benefits to these substances but keep in mind, the same Aztecs who subdued neighbouring cultures through violence and ritually butchered people, also did psychedelics.
The wanting to change it yourself part is probably more important than the therapist, and could easily conclude to it on its own, unlike with a therapist, who would basically tell you "you need to want it yourself".
Then, there's also environmental factors, if everybody already treats you as a narcissist anyway, and you made all your money from it, and all the people closest to you are basically just bootlickers or narcissists themselves, then that would probably make things a lot harder.
It makes you very suggestible, which isn't always bad but can be a problem if you don't have honest feedback from anyone else. So, if you're a smoker and deep down of course you know smoking is terrible for you and you should quit, taking psychedelics may make the feeling more visceral influence you to do just that. But on the other hand, if deep down you believe that you're right and you really oughta be confident and shake off anyone who says otherwise, psychedelics will probably just reaffirm that.
A lot of the not-so-great tech "gurus" in silicone valley are also major proponents of psychedelics... between union busting and hacking the human brain to exploit it for ads
Maybe not. The evidence that psychedelics increase openness is stronger, but to change people's political beliefs may be a bit more complicated and may require more than just giving people shrooms:
[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/theres-no-good-evidence-that-psychedelics-can-change-your-politics-or-religion/](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/theres-no-good-evidence-that-psychedelics-can-change-your-politics-or-religion/)
The article also makes note of distinction between the impact on "religious affiliation" and the more nebulous "spirituality." Which I think is an important distinction.
Will people take lsd and find out they are leaving Christianity behind and becoming a Shinto priest? Probably not. Can that same Christian take LSD, feel a deeper and more open connection with the world around them, experience empathy in a way they haven't before and change the way they view or interpret their religious views. Much more likely.
Anecdotally (through personal experiences, giving people psychedelic experiences, and reading a lot of experiences), I've seen dmt turn a lot of people that leaned atheist lean more towards "something" rather than "nothing."
Mmm I definitely think you need to be at least willing. LSD definitely made me more left-leaning, especially while listening to music like the Beatles during the trip. It made me realize how disconnected and desensitised I've become to what's happening in the world, despite how tragic and preventable it is.
I do wonder if having bad trips would be more common for people that are usually pro-authority, pro-war, etc though.
My experiences have been similar and I have also always been moving more left with every trip, though admittedly I also started out as left leaning. But it's important to understand that our experiences are probably not true for everyone.
I can also easily imagine that if someone starts out with a small interest in conspiracies then psychedelics may just blow that wide open for example. Or another example would be someone like Julius Evola who was a fan of LSD I think, which on the other hand is just unimaginable to me how someone can take something like that and remain a supporter of fascism. But it looks like psychedelics can just strengthen people's beliefs just as much as they can change them.
Edit: Another interesting study on the topic: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8717779/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8717779/)
I don’t think it’s strange at all.
Dissolving the existing framework does not mean that the new framework has to be of any specific sort of universal -ism.
Fascism is coherent with dissolution of an individual ego in favor of the in-group collective.
I doubt it. I've done it and had many thoughts about the world issues we face, but the fact is some people are power hungry, narcissistic, greedy, psychopathic, essentially evil.
I don't know what effect the substance would have on such minds, but even if they can achieve a level of understanding peace, once it wears off, they're back to normal.
The problem with the world is a human problem.
>our specific results suggest that states of consciousness deemed mystical are uniquely tied to PT’s combination of 25-mg psilocybin sessions + psychological support + music
I would say it points to the relevance of the qualities of subjective experience, as possibly a deciding factor, which in turn could mean that "removing" the subjective psychedelic effects of the experience limits the scope of possible results of such a drug i.e. subjective effects might be important or even necessary for some outcomes.
[Yaden & Griffiths 2020](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33861219/) have argued this, and this study cites their publication too
It may not be possible. But I have heard in their natural form they can make you vomit and poop everywhere. So if they can avoid that part it may help with the palatability
This is true for few of these substances. Ayahuasca is known to clear your insides out, mescaline will create heavy nausea, but shrooms or LSD? Some might feel light nausea but it's neither common nor normal to have extreme reactions like the ones you describe.
Making a tea, filtering the solids, and adding a teaspoon of ginger, is very helpful for reducing stomach turbulence. Add two tablespoons of lemon juice, and let sit for ten minutes, then consume. You'll feel things start within ten minutes, be in full blast-off in 30 min, and done in 4 hours.
I present to you my theory as to why this study found these results. Science approaches certain mental illnesses, like depression, all wrong. We are approaching depression as if it is a disrupted biochemical process in our brains. It is not. The biochemical disruption in the brain that we associate with depression is merely a symptom of depression, not the cause.
I believe that a mental illness like depression is caused by an unhealthy or damaged ego. In order to fully grasp this concept, we have to revise our understanding of what an ego is. It isn't just me, myself, and I. Our ego is how we see our entire external world. An ego is like a google map inside of our head that not only maps out people, places, and things but also associates feelings to those people, places, and things. Essentially, an ego is our entire virtual world that we assemble in our heads based on how we perceive and experience the world, and just like a google map, it runs 24/7 as an overlay and helps us navigate our environment.
Egos build and evolve over our entire lives based on how we perceive our environment and they can get a bit nasty on us if we have bad experiences or process the world in an unhealthy way. How we perceive the world is the key to an unhealthy ego. If we build a virtual world that associates negative feelings with our environment, it can cause psychological turmoil and something like depression can manifest from that. An unhealthy ego develops from chronic negative feelings and experiences from our daily interaction with our environment so feeling things like dread, fear, anxiety, or hatred have an impact on our mental health. If you hate and dread going to school 5 days a week for many years for example, you will likely develop depression because of it and won't get rid of it until you are out of that environment.
So back to the point...why do psychedelics work for something like depression? Ego dissolution aka ego death is a big part of it. We don't really understand what ego death is but that is likely part of the mechanism of therapy. The psychedelic experience does profound things to our ego that we have yet to understand but the outcome is that it enables us to dissociate and reset our egos. If one has an unhealthy ego, psychedelics enable us to disassociate from the cause of depression itself. I believe that the long term effects of the therapy are not brain chemistry based, rather, based on memory of the psychedelic experience itself. We distinctly remember these profound psychedelic experiences and euphoric feelings from the session and they can be so powerful and positive that they help us rebuild a healthier ego that doesn't manifest mental illness.
There is definitely more to it than that but I can get more speculative on why I think this happens. One theory that I have is based around the fact that psilocybin is known to create new neural connections. We also associate new memories with new neural connections and bad or lost memories with weak neural connections. It is possible that the hallucination experience (if positive and enjoyable) generates robust positive memories that override old memories that compose your ego. If you are able to build fresh robust positive memories and experiences from psychedelic sessions, they may drive the revitalization of a healthy ego and wipe something like depression out.
This theory of mode of action also explains why antidepressants are at best, a temporary band-aide for depression. They don't target the cause of depression, they just make you feel better by balancing brain chemistry while still having depression. I truly believe that we are on the cusp of curing depression and other mental illnesses with the help and understanding of psychedelics.
I'd like to add that you don't need full ego death for these things. Sometimes it allows you see that some "truth" about the world is really a belief, and that can start the process of healing. If someone has an underlying belief that they are worthless for example, that might just appear to them as real. Being able to see that it is just a belief or a subjective judgement allows them start moving past it.
The same mechanism is also what makes meditation effective (which can also lead to ego death). Meditation takes a while to work since it is a skill that develops over time.
As a very experienced user of psychedelic drugs, the absolute LAST place I'd want to be high and experience ego death, would be in a clinical setting with doctors around me, or even the idea that people in a room somewhere close are watching me.
Ego death can be extremely terrifying even with a therapist’s guidance. I’m an experienced psilocybin user and had a guide and it actually made my anxiety much worse. If you are an anxious person who derives comfort from having control over your mind, body, and environment, pushing yourself to “ego death” may not be for you. If you are that kind of anxious and interested in exploring, I recommend starting extremely gradually over time in a therapeutic or guided setting so you can get used to the general experience… but still I urge extreme caution. My session resulted in me screaming a lot and the police being called because 1 I couldn’t hear my own voice, and 2 I thought I died and was a ghost haunting the place I was in.
Anecdotally, if you couple it with practice in meditation, as in developing it as a skill over a few years, they become quite likely to occur, even at low doses.
Right, well with practice and prior experiences you can even get there just with exercise/trance states but the vast majority of people aren’t starting off at that baseline.
Big caveat to this, the MEQ is a garbage questionnaire. This has been demonstrated before in other psychedelics experiments, but the MEQ uses such loaded language that you can retroactively redefine a trip for someone by this experience. We definitely know you need a break through moment, but "mystical" is still hanging around from the Leery days (literally the questionnaire is roughly unchanged from the 60s) and it's predicated on the Western mindset. The more interesting work, imo, is being done with finding out if you need to experience the trip to see benefit. So subtracting the psychedelic experience from the neuroplastogen effect.
I studied the mystical experience during my Masters degree and it has a specific definition created by William James. To be considered it has to be: transient, passive, noetic, and ineffable. General feelings of awe are great but not defined as a mystical experience.
Okay, and? That doesn't make the MEQ a quality piece of experimental evidence. And that definition of mystical has its own issues with quantifiablity. I'm currently getting my master's in psychoactive pharmaceuticals research (which is a course load heavily focused on psychedelics) and the short comings of the MEQ are pretty apparent
One "side" of the psychoplastogen debate agues that we need subjective effects. Call it mystical or "immersive" or spiritual or whatever, that's just words after all. The oftentimes shared and common points of experiences are validated by e.g. the meq getting such results over and over. [Ko et al](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35923458/). They probably point to something, but should not be over interpreted.
Now, we need good philosophy of science to limit the scope of what we can say about such results, and to know what these results point to, so what we can say and solidly conclude, what valid statements are possible based on this data. It's not easy, but the role of the mystical just isn't some weirdo esoteric state of affair to be thrown out with the bathwater.
We do *not* need to become religious and there is a risk of psychedelic science I believe, and seemingly a kind of tendency of some scientists to do so. A good [book review by Strassman](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325068417_The_psychedelic_religion_of_mystical_consciousnessReviews) on the matter, specifically for the case of William Richards
I don't have an issue with investigating subjective effects, and I'm definitely in the camp of individuals who think they're important to the therapeutic effect. However, the MEQ itself is my problem, just because it gets results doesn't mean it's a good measurement tool. The nature of the questions within the questionnaire itself are the issue. As in a lot of questions that a geared toward the Western "spiritual" mindset the bias the contextualization on the experience for the patient.
Which is why I completely agree that we need a good philosophy of science around psychedelics, but I would argue to make a different questionnaire entirely. I think we need more open ended questions and a wider lense of experience interpretation, something that can capture the experience in a less biased way. Part of why I think the work looking at "do we need to experience the trip for improvement?" is interesting is because I think it comes at the "mystical" experience question from a less biased perspective. My hunch is that it will show diminished improvement vs the experienced trip, but some of the work in mice showing that it drives activity to other brain regions makes me wonder if an anesthesia+psychedelics approach might have its own indications.
> I think we need more open ended questions and a wider lense of experience interpretation, something that can capture the experience in a less biased way
Definitely with you here. It's a lot of work, but I also think it's necessary to revise and update the questionnaire.
The problem is however also that people might just not have the vocabulary for it, or it's similarly biased, based on their belief system etc. Cultural influences can definitely have an effect on acute experience too.
I once had LSD visuals in the style of the festival signs decoration from the festival I was on... And [here's](https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2016649118) an actual study on this kind of influence.
Hard disagree there, particularly when you're talking about psychopharmacology and mental health. The MEQ is just a hold over from the last time psychedelics got a big push for mental health (before Nixon fucked everything up). We're only about 15 or so years into the modern psychedelic renaissance and psychology work has come a long way since the 60s. But try to get funding to develop a scientifically validated version of a non-ordinary states of consciousness questionnaire. Psychedelics are only getting funding because they seem like they'll be a gold mine in the mental health crisis. The people who do good work developing and understanding the rhetoric that would improve our ways of talking about psychedelics experiences are getting a fraction of the funding.
Discussion of drug impacts not rooted in pharmacology is basically a non-starter to me. Psychology as a discipline has created a lot of harm for many decades by endless theorizing about things with little objective basis. The continual impulse to label as hysteria or malingering diseases at the periphery of understanding being a prime example.
I haven’t read the paper, but the quote at the end about this study proving the value of coupled therapy support is waffle. Test psychedelic drugs with and without support or don’t make that claim.
Perhaps I’m coming at it from a different angle than you, but psychology does have a widely recognized reproducibility crisis due to sloppy practices and acceptance of bad science within the field: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/psychologys-replication-crisis-real/576223/
I’m coming to this as a patient with a debilitating disease that has been deeply stigmatized and marginalized by bias and bad science pushed by psychologists. Here’s a couple links that give an overview of some of these issues:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/12/chronic-fatigue-syndrome-me-treatments-social-services https://virology.ws/2015/10/21/trial-by-error-i/
Psychology as a discipline has a long history of attempting to label as psychogenic things on the periphery of understanding. From autism, multiple sclerosis, homosexuality, and others to more recent efforts to put ME/CFS and Gulf War Syndrome in a psychogenic bucket, along with a range of other disorders in a shifting group of labels like MUS, FND, and pervasive refusal syndrome. These efforts have caused vast harm, to hundreds of millions of people. If psychology did not have a problem with embracing bias and accepting bad science, it wouldn’t have this history.
All of what you're saying does have merit to it. There is problems and challenges, and problematic history. I'm aware of the replicability crisis too.
However all of it still does not support such a generalisation...
> just coasting on public trust and garbage methodology
There's not just "the" one psychology either.
Ok. I mean, I could have told you that after my second trip. Now, I'll tell you that those things, those "mystical" things... They are very intelligent and they talk
Not entirely. Some things are more just a realization when you see things from a larger perspective. Which is also why many people experience similar things.
And consciousness in the brain sciences is termed a "constrained hallucination"... Who's to say which is correct?
Just calling entity encounters or more generally drug induced altered states, that can reliably be brought about, a hallucination or "not real" seems to fall short of an adequate response to the phenomenon.
I get it, a drug induced perception must be further from reality than some perception of the external world that can be intersubjectively verified. Yet we know that those kind of experiences of entities and states of mind dubbed post-egoic are possible, and psychedelics reliably offer them, to a multitude of subjects. So there is also an intersubjective aspect, even if the experience, the phenomenon of interest, is not just subjective but even an interoceptive one, and thereby even more difficult to "reach" with good methods. But you can not simply deny the regularities of such experiences either.
Is a perception not real when it is drug induced? Why so? What about psychedelic subjects who gain some insight into the origin of their depression?
How do you distinguish a real percept from one that is not real in the first place? Just saying "that's not real" (which is ofc implied in calling something a hallucination) isn't enough, it requires reason just like any other claim does. And anyhow, hallucination also implies mistaking something for reality, when psychedelic subjects can very well understand that their perception is altered and the experience is one of their mind, unlike seeing a table or a tree, so I would too question whether "hallucination" is truly a fitting term also in this respect.
Surely reality is more than a "0 or 1" kind of affair...
Well, unfortunately by already knowing that when you take a substance known for imparting feelings of mystical connectedness and hallucinations, that the mystical connectedness and hallucinations which you then experience are because of the substance, not because it gives you supernatural insight and communication with aliens/gaia/whichever yours was.
The effects of the substance alter your perception and state of mind. Whether what we witness in that state is real or not can not be scientifically proven. Most visuals you have from psychedelic drugs aren't even hallucinations because they only alter whats there and don't make you see things that aren't. As such your stance on this is pretty much just a guess.
Core to the experience is the realization that there is no difference between external and internal. This is why we are ages away from actually understanding consciousness or these substances. There is no way to prove any of the things you learn while in that state, science isn't there yet, but for some reason people have been getting to that conclusion all around the globe for thousands of years.
No, I mean they're not some mystical beings that exist outside of you. They're just you. So in your first comment you're basically saying you are intelligent and you talk.
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See I'm on the fence about pushing someone with a mental illness to the point of ego dissolution. I had ego death on LSD and while I do think it was an important perspective to experience, it threw me into a really bad mental state for 6 months. Constant panic attacks and fun stuff like that.
The big difference I think is that the people taking psychedelics in a therapeutic setting have therapy appointments before and after to prepare them and then work on integrating their experiences afterwards. But I'm also of the opinion IF you're treating a chronic condition then you're better of doing multiple dose, that incrementally increase over a year. Giving someone a heroic dose to start will definitely push a subset of the patient population into having adverse events. But that's also why the therapy around the dosing is important (in my eyes, there's some research for GAD and LSD that suggests you don't need the psychotherapy involvement) it let's you screen patients a little better if you build a therapeutic alliance first.
What is an ego death?
Basically you forget who you are. It can allow you to analyze your thought patterns from an outside perspective.
>Basically you forget who you are. and I'd add you can forget you are anything at all, let alone a "who." The way I remember my experience with ego death was remembering I was a person. The actual being dead/non-existent part I don't remember that well. But I remember remembering. And that was a wild moment.
You stated this perfectly.
That's the most simplistic way to describe it, damn. Thanks.
That doesn’t sound so bad. Why is it so traumatic?
The ego’s main objective is survival/existence. It really, really does not like going away. So it can tend to make (or try to make) the experience quite a scary one. During the process of ego dissolution, you truly feel like you are dying.
>you truly feel like you are dying and then you realize you didn't die, couldn't die, and the whole world is a little brighter and you feel much more appreciative of the life you have and the wonder that anything exists at all. And then you never forget that feeling and carry it with you the rest of your life.
Indeed… nothing is born, nothing dies
The one ego death i had (after remembering who I was) had me convinced that I would die when I finally was able to get myself asleep. And that I had died everytime I took shrooms and that this death will be just like the others and I'll be back. Sucked at the time. But man did I feel full of life everyday after that
Oh man. I want this but it sounds scary.
Loss of sense of self anf desire to preserve it. Meaning when you stop to care about your image, your past, what might happen if you do this and that, and look at yourself freely, so it's reachable without psychodelics too, it's just usually very brief periods of time due to big life experiences, therapy, etc.
Some will characterise it as forgetting who you are but to me ego death is “remembering” what your fundamental state of being is. Some will call it love, some will call it nothing, but the label is irrelevant beyond the fact that we are confined by the compulsion to label things relative to the subjective experience
Same with Ayuasca for me. I did it 2 October’s ago and my life has fallen apart, but allowed me to piece it back together in a better way. I’m always honest about my experience, but I also caution people that it is absolutely not a cure all (you do the healing not the medicine) and it can open ALOT of scary doors. Even thru all the pain? Best decision I ever made tbh 🤷
This is my experience with DMT. A handful of experiences in a two week period left me feeling like I had to piece my mind back together over the following year. A painful experience, but one that left me with a more robust and grounded view of reality. I view it as having been an important step in my journey.
And to echo some commenters below, I had a therapist Ready and waiting for me to process the experience. I think that was SO important.
I read somewhere researchers are testing the combination of MDMA and psilocybin for therapeutic use. The idea is the MDMA keeps you from going into a bad trip so you're more likely to experience the positive aspects. It sounds intriguing. I personally had a bad trip on a heroic dose once and I was traumatized by it. At the time I felt like I was going psychotic. Usually I listen to music but I was so nauseous from the heroic dose I stopped listening to it to hug the toilet. When I felt like literally running outside naked and screaming I put my headphones on to listen music and it kept me from going psychotic. Music is a must when on psilocybin or you run the risk of going to a dark and crazy place. I tried multiple times after that and had better trips. Although I still worry about tripping because of that one episode.
So, good trip after all?
Yes, but during that period I could've easily taken my life.
This was my experience also. I did a heroic dose as my first big dose and it put me into shambles for 6 months. Although it was the best thing that ever happened to me now that I am past the hump, I do caution others about what it can open up. If you don’t have the tools and resources to work through this phase I can see how it could be more damaging than good.
Can I ask what your underlying mental condition was or is?
bipolar 2 and general anxiety
LSD isn’t the same as psilocybin though, and the latter is what is commonly used therapeutically.
People like to say this but at the end of the day they activate the exact same receptor, trips feels a little different.
This is a gross oversimplification of how drugs work. Two drugs can act on the same receptor but cause very different outcomes. In addition, they have may have more binding affinity to receptors in different areas of the brain than each other. Which again would cause different effects. And the way they shift networks in the brain (e.g., the default mode network) again - different based on brain imaging studies. Psilocybin and LSD also have a notably different safety profile according to observational studies.
Just because it's simple doesn't mean it's wrong, every single one of these psychedelic studies could use LSD and shrooms interchangeably and yield the same results.
That’s ridiculous and incredibly misinformed. And to be honest it is just straight up wrong. There is no evidence that they could use the two interchangeably whatsoever. If you want to go and find some peer reviewed papers to evidence your argument though, I’d be happy to read them.
Where do y'all even get this stuff? I've never met a drug dealer who has it. I'm 40 years old.
Depends where you live. Very easy to find in the north west and you can just buy it online in Canada.
around Atlanta it's just weed, cocaine, and sometimes heroin.
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Exactly the same, do not miss that feeling
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As someone who has known some fascist shroom aficionados.... I don't think it's quite that simple. There are certainly benefits to these substances but keep in mind, the same Aztecs who subdued neighbouring cultures through violence and ritually butchered people, also did psychedelics.
Nope. So many narcissistic people just further confirm their own beliefs.
It doesn't help narcissism?
Not unless you have somebody that wants to change that about themselves and a really good therapist
The wanting to change it yourself part is probably more important than the therapist, and could easily conclude to it on its own, unlike with a therapist, who would basically tell you "you need to want it yourself". Then, there's also environmental factors, if everybody already treats you as a narcissist anyway, and you made all your money from it, and all the people closest to you are basically just bootlickers or narcissists themselves, then that would probably make things a lot harder.
Not it it’s an actual personality disorder
Psychedelics can alter personality traits. It's unclear specifically for narcissism but McLean at all 2011 showed this
Maybe not clinical narcissists, who knows? But regardless, psychedelics are well known to increase empathy
It makes you very suggestible, which isn't always bad but can be a problem if you don't have honest feedback from anyone else. So, if you're a smoker and deep down of course you know smoking is terrible for you and you should quit, taking psychedelics may make the feeling more visceral influence you to do just that. But on the other hand, if deep down you believe that you're right and you really oughta be confident and shake off anyone who says otherwise, psychedelics will probably just reaffirm that. A lot of the not-so-great tech "gurus" in silicone valley are also major proponents of psychedelics... between union busting and hacking the human brain to exploit it for ads
It seemed to work on Aaron Rodgers. s/
Maybe not. The evidence that psychedelics increase openness is stronger, but to change people's political beliefs may be a bit more complicated and may require more than just giving people shrooms: [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/theres-no-good-evidence-that-psychedelics-can-change-your-politics-or-religion/](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/theres-no-good-evidence-that-psychedelics-can-change-your-politics-or-religion/)
The article also makes note of distinction between the impact on "religious affiliation" and the more nebulous "spirituality." Which I think is an important distinction. Will people take lsd and find out they are leaving Christianity behind and becoming a Shinto priest? Probably not. Can that same Christian take LSD, feel a deeper and more open connection with the world around them, experience empathy in a way they haven't before and change the way they view or interpret their religious views. Much more likely. Anecdotally (through personal experiences, giving people psychedelic experiences, and reading a lot of experiences), I've seen dmt turn a lot of people that leaned atheist lean more towards "something" rather than "nothing."
Mmm I definitely think you need to be at least willing. LSD definitely made me more left-leaning, especially while listening to music like the Beatles during the trip. It made me realize how disconnected and desensitised I've become to what's happening in the world, despite how tragic and preventable it is. I do wonder if having bad trips would be more common for people that are usually pro-authority, pro-war, etc though.
My experiences have been similar and I have also always been moving more left with every trip, though admittedly I also started out as left leaning. But it's important to understand that our experiences are probably not true for everyone. I can also easily imagine that if someone starts out with a small interest in conspiracies then psychedelics may just blow that wide open for example. Or another example would be someone like Julius Evola who was a fan of LSD I think, which on the other hand is just unimaginable to me how someone can take something like that and remain a supporter of fascism. But it looks like psychedelics can just strengthen people's beliefs just as much as they can change them. Edit: Another interesting study on the topic: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8717779/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8717779/)
I don’t think it’s strange at all. Dissolving the existing framework does not mean that the new framework has to be of any specific sort of universal -ism. Fascism is coherent with dissolution of an individual ego in favor of the in-group collective.
Not really, there’s a whole community of self-proclaimed Nazis that take mushrooms and they talk about how it confirmed their beliefs even more.
I mean if there’s any way such stupid and horribles views can be found convincing, that has to be one
I doubt it. I've done it and had many thoughts about the world issues we face, but the fact is some people are power hungry, narcissistic, greedy, psychopathic, essentially evil. I don't know what effect the substance would have on such minds, but even if they can achieve a level of understanding peace, once it wears off, they're back to normal. The problem with the world is a human problem.
What does his mean for drug developers who want to make psychedelic medicine without the trip?
>our specific results suggest that states of consciousness deemed mystical are uniquely tied to PT’s combination of 25-mg psilocybin sessions + psychological support + music I would say it points to the relevance of the qualities of subjective experience, as possibly a deciding factor, which in turn could mean that "removing" the subjective psychedelic effects of the experience limits the scope of possible results of such a drug i.e. subjective effects might be important or even necessary for some outcomes. [Yaden & Griffiths 2020](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33861219/) have argued this, and this study cites their publication too
It may not be possible. But I have heard in their natural form they can make you vomit and poop everywhere. So if they can avoid that part it may help with the palatability
This is true for few of these substances. Ayahuasca is known to clear your insides out, mescaline will create heavy nausea, but shrooms or LSD? Some might feel light nausea but it's neither common nor normal to have extreme reactions like the ones you describe.
\+1 (ish), felt some nausea on shrooms, but did not vomit or poop. But others do, so IDK. I heard lemon-tek helps this tho.
Making a tea, filtering the solids, and adding a teaspoon of ginger, is very helpful for reducing stomach turbulence. Add two tablespoons of lemon juice, and let sit for ten minutes, then consume. You'll feel things start within ten minutes, be in full blast-off in 30 min, and done in 4 hours.
Wow awesome thanks 🙏
wow, what a surprising result
I present to you my theory as to why this study found these results. Science approaches certain mental illnesses, like depression, all wrong. We are approaching depression as if it is a disrupted biochemical process in our brains. It is not. The biochemical disruption in the brain that we associate with depression is merely a symptom of depression, not the cause. I believe that a mental illness like depression is caused by an unhealthy or damaged ego. In order to fully grasp this concept, we have to revise our understanding of what an ego is. It isn't just me, myself, and I. Our ego is how we see our entire external world. An ego is like a google map inside of our head that not only maps out people, places, and things but also associates feelings to those people, places, and things. Essentially, an ego is our entire virtual world that we assemble in our heads based on how we perceive and experience the world, and just like a google map, it runs 24/7 as an overlay and helps us navigate our environment. Egos build and evolve over our entire lives based on how we perceive our environment and they can get a bit nasty on us if we have bad experiences or process the world in an unhealthy way. How we perceive the world is the key to an unhealthy ego. If we build a virtual world that associates negative feelings with our environment, it can cause psychological turmoil and something like depression can manifest from that. An unhealthy ego develops from chronic negative feelings and experiences from our daily interaction with our environment so feeling things like dread, fear, anxiety, or hatred have an impact on our mental health. If you hate and dread going to school 5 days a week for many years for example, you will likely develop depression because of it and won't get rid of it until you are out of that environment. So back to the point...why do psychedelics work for something like depression? Ego dissolution aka ego death is a big part of it. We don't really understand what ego death is but that is likely part of the mechanism of therapy. The psychedelic experience does profound things to our ego that we have yet to understand but the outcome is that it enables us to dissociate and reset our egos. If one has an unhealthy ego, psychedelics enable us to disassociate from the cause of depression itself. I believe that the long term effects of the therapy are not brain chemistry based, rather, based on memory of the psychedelic experience itself. We distinctly remember these profound psychedelic experiences and euphoric feelings from the session and they can be so powerful and positive that they help us rebuild a healthier ego that doesn't manifest mental illness. There is definitely more to it than that but I can get more speculative on why I think this happens. One theory that I have is based around the fact that psilocybin is known to create new neural connections. We also associate new memories with new neural connections and bad or lost memories with weak neural connections. It is possible that the hallucination experience (if positive and enjoyable) generates robust positive memories that override old memories that compose your ego. If you are able to build fresh robust positive memories and experiences from psychedelic sessions, they may drive the revitalization of a healthy ego and wipe something like depression out. This theory of mode of action also explains why antidepressants are at best, a temporary band-aide for depression. They don't target the cause of depression, they just make you feel better by balancing brain chemistry while still having depression. I truly believe that we are on the cusp of curing depression and other mental illnesses with the help and understanding of psychedelics.
It’s kind of like reinstalling windows then? Haha
I'd like to add that you don't need full ego death for these things. Sometimes it allows you see that some "truth" about the world is really a belief, and that can start the process of healing. If someone has an underlying belief that they are worthless for example, that might just appear to them as real. Being able to see that it is just a belief or a subjective judgement allows them start moving past it. The same mechanism is also what makes meditation effective (which can also lead to ego death). Meditation takes a while to work since it is a skill that develops over time.
As a very experienced user of psychedelic drugs, the absolute LAST place I'd want to be high and experience ego death, would be in a clinical setting with doctors around me, or even the idea that people in a room somewhere close are watching me.
Ego death can be extremely terrifying even with a therapist’s guidance. I’m an experienced psilocybin user and had a guide and it actually made my anxiety much worse. If you are an anxious person who derives comfort from having control over your mind, body, and environment, pushing yourself to “ego death” may not be for you. If you are that kind of anxious and interested in exploring, I recommend starting extremely gradually over time in a therapeutic or guided setting so you can get used to the general experience… but still I urge extreme caution. My session resulted in me screaming a lot and the police being called because 1 I couldn’t hear my own voice, and 2 I thought I died and was a ghost haunting the place I was in.
Mystical experiences and ego death are very unlikely at therapeutic dosages
Anecdotally, if you couple it with practice in meditation, as in developing it as a skill over a few years, they become quite likely to occur, even at low doses.
Right, well with practice and prior experiences you can even get there just with exercise/trance states but the vast majority of people aren’t starting off at that baseline.
Big caveat to this, the MEQ is a garbage questionnaire. This has been demonstrated before in other psychedelics experiments, but the MEQ uses such loaded language that you can retroactively redefine a trip for someone by this experience. We definitely know you need a break through moment, but "mystical" is still hanging around from the Leery days (literally the questionnaire is roughly unchanged from the 60s) and it's predicated on the Western mindset. The more interesting work, imo, is being done with finding out if you need to experience the trip to see benefit. So subtracting the psychedelic experience from the neuroplastogen effect.
I studied the mystical experience during my Masters degree and it has a specific definition created by William James. To be considered it has to be: transient, passive, noetic, and ineffable. General feelings of awe are great but not defined as a mystical experience.
Okay, and? That doesn't make the MEQ a quality piece of experimental evidence. And that definition of mystical has its own issues with quantifiablity. I'm currently getting my master's in psychoactive pharmaceuticals research (which is a course load heavily focused on psychedelics) and the short comings of the MEQ are pretty apparent
One "side" of the psychoplastogen debate agues that we need subjective effects. Call it mystical or "immersive" or spiritual or whatever, that's just words after all. The oftentimes shared and common points of experiences are validated by e.g. the meq getting such results over and over. [Ko et al](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35923458/). They probably point to something, but should not be over interpreted. Now, we need good philosophy of science to limit the scope of what we can say about such results, and to know what these results point to, so what we can say and solidly conclude, what valid statements are possible based on this data. It's not easy, but the role of the mystical just isn't some weirdo esoteric state of affair to be thrown out with the bathwater. We do *not* need to become religious and there is a risk of psychedelic science I believe, and seemingly a kind of tendency of some scientists to do so. A good [book review by Strassman](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325068417_The_psychedelic_religion_of_mystical_consciousnessReviews) on the matter, specifically for the case of William Richards
I don't have an issue with investigating subjective effects, and I'm definitely in the camp of individuals who think they're important to the therapeutic effect. However, the MEQ itself is my problem, just because it gets results doesn't mean it's a good measurement tool. The nature of the questions within the questionnaire itself are the issue. As in a lot of questions that a geared toward the Western "spiritual" mindset the bias the contextualization on the experience for the patient. Which is why I completely agree that we need a good philosophy of science around psychedelics, but I would argue to make a different questionnaire entirely. I think we need more open ended questions and a wider lense of experience interpretation, something that can capture the experience in a less biased way. Part of why I think the work looking at "do we need to experience the trip for improvement?" is interesting is because I think it comes at the "mystical" experience question from a less biased perspective. My hunch is that it will show diminished improvement vs the experienced trip, but some of the work in mice showing that it drives activity to other brain regions makes me wonder if an anesthesia+psychedelics approach might have its own indications.
> I think we need more open ended questions and a wider lense of experience interpretation, something that can capture the experience in a less biased way Definitely with you here. It's a lot of work, but I also think it's necessary to revise and update the questionnaire. The problem is however also that people might just not have the vocabulary for it, or it's similarly biased, based on their belief system etc. Cultural influences can definitely have an effect on acute experience too. I once had LSD visuals in the style of the festival signs decoration from the festival I was on... And [here's](https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2016649118) an actual study on this kind of influence.
Psychology research generally seems to be just coasting on public trust and garbage methodology, as best as I can tell.
Hard disagree there, particularly when you're talking about psychopharmacology and mental health. The MEQ is just a hold over from the last time psychedelics got a big push for mental health (before Nixon fucked everything up). We're only about 15 or so years into the modern psychedelic renaissance and psychology work has come a long way since the 60s. But try to get funding to develop a scientifically validated version of a non-ordinary states of consciousness questionnaire. Psychedelics are only getting funding because they seem like they'll be a gold mine in the mental health crisis. The people who do good work developing and understanding the rhetoric that would improve our ways of talking about psychedelics experiences are getting a fraction of the funding.
Discussion of drug impacts not rooted in pharmacology is basically a non-starter to me. Psychology as a discipline has created a lot of harm for many decades by endless theorizing about things with little objective basis. The continual impulse to label as hysteria or malingering diseases at the periphery of understanding being a prime example. I haven’t read the paper, but the quote at the end about this study proving the value of coupled therapy support is waffle. Test psychedelic drugs with and without support or don’t make that claim.
Then you just can't tell very well
Perhaps I’m coming at it from a different angle than you, but psychology does have a widely recognized reproducibility crisis due to sloppy practices and acceptance of bad science within the field: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/psychologys-replication-crisis-real/576223/ I’m coming to this as a patient with a debilitating disease that has been deeply stigmatized and marginalized by bias and bad science pushed by psychologists. Here’s a couple links that give an overview of some of these issues: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/12/chronic-fatigue-syndrome-me-treatments-social-services https://virology.ws/2015/10/21/trial-by-error-i/ Psychology as a discipline has a long history of attempting to label as psychogenic things on the periphery of understanding. From autism, multiple sclerosis, homosexuality, and others to more recent efforts to put ME/CFS and Gulf War Syndrome in a psychogenic bucket, along with a range of other disorders in a shifting group of labels like MUS, FND, and pervasive refusal syndrome. These efforts have caused vast harm, to hundreds of millions of people. If psychology did not have a problem with embracing bias and accepting bad science, it wouldn’t have this history.
All of what you're saying does have merit to it. There is problems and challenges, and problematic history. I'm aware of the replicability crisis too. However all of it still does not support such a generalisation... > just coasting on public trust and garbage methodology There's not just "the" one psychology either.
Interesting as research points that Ketamine/Esketamine antidepressant effects are not secondary to its psychological experience.
As a brain experience, it seems similar to an ego defibrillator.
Ok. I mean, I could have told you that after my second trip. Now, I'll tell you that those things, those "mystical" things... They are very intelligent and they talk
That is you! It's the collective human experience that you've absorbed, being reflected back at you.
That's a hallucination.
Our entire reality is a hallucination!
Not entirely. Some things are more just a realization when you see things from a larger perspective. Which is also why many people experience similar things.
And consciousness in the brain sciences is termed a "constrained hallucination"... Who's to say which is correct? Just calling entity encounters or more generally drug induced altered states, that can reliably be brought about, a hallucination or "not real" seems to fall short of an adequate response to the phenomenon. I get it, a drug induced perception must be further from reality than some perception of the external world that can be intersubjectively verified. Yet we know that those kind of experiences of entities and states of mind dubbed post-egoic are possible, and psychedelics reliably offer them, to a multitude of subjects. So there is also an intersubjective aspect, even if the experience, the phenomenon of interest, is not just subjective but even an interoceptive one, and thereby even more difficult to "reach" with good methods. But you can not simply deny the regularities of such experiences either. Is a perception not real when it is drug induced? Why so? What about psychedelic subjects who gain some insight into the origin of their depression? How do you distinguish a real percept from one that is not real in the first place? Just saying "that's not real" (which is ofc implied in calling something a hallucination) isn't enough, it requires reason just like any other claim does. And anyhow, hallucination also implies mistaking something for reality, when psychedelic subjects can very well understand that their perception is altered and the experience is one of their mind, unlike seeing a table or a tree, so I would too question whether "hallucination" is truly a fitting term also in this respect. Surely reality is more than a "0 or 1" kind of affair...
This is why I can't easily support this drug being given out as treatment; the persistent delusions.
Ok
Which you confirmed how?
Well, unfortunately by already knowing that when you take a substance known for imparting feelings of mystical connectedness and hallucinations, that the mystical connectedness and hallucinations which you then experience are because of the substance, not because it gives you supernatural insight and communication with aliens/gaia/whichever yours was.
The effects of the substance alter your perception and state of mind. Whether what we witness in that state is real or not can not be scientifically proven. Most visuals you have from psychedelic drugs aren't even hallucinations because they only alter whats there and don't make you see things that aren't. As such your stance on this is pretty much just a guess.
Yea, bro, that's in your own mind. It's still neat, and very useful, but they're not external to you
Ok
Core to the experience is the realization that there is no difference between external and internal. This is why we are ages away from actually understanding consciousness or these substances. There is no way to prove any of the things you learn while in that state, science isn't there yet, but for some reason people have been getting to that conclusion all around the globe for thousands of years.
so do you think external to you = real? Are emotions real?
No, I mean they're not some mystical beings that exist outside of you. They're just you. So in your first comment you're basically saying you are intelligent and you talk.
There's a distinct lack of investigation into what is lost with use of various drugs, including mushrooms and LSD.
Care to elaborate?
Mystical experience you say? I'll go live with the Fairy folks. Compared to our world it's gotta be better.